On the independence anniversary the king argues racial equality

Manigat quotes Christophe's speech of 29 November 1817, delivered on what he identifies as the anniversary of the first official proclamation of national independence, in which the king said Haitians would confound the slanderers of their race by proving they were in no way inferior to other inhabitants of the globe and were capable of acquiring and practising the sciences and arts and reaching a degree of progress and civilisation equal to that of Europeans. The same argument runs through the king's message of 1 January 1817, which held that good citizens must be educated and that light spread through the whole population would replace the ignorance and corrupted morals left by barbarism and slavery. Manigat then cites visiting witnesses, including a Methodist pastor in 1819 who examined boys in a royal school and found them no less able than any others. Where this account departs from the standard one: Treats 29 November as the anniversary of the first official proclamation of Haitian national independence, rather than 1 January 1804.

Around 1818 Adanzan, king of Dahomey, was removed by his younger brother Gezo and held in prison. Dahomey had no procedure for deposing a king, and one commentator wrote that to dethrone one was sacrilege and to replace him a sort of usurpation. The record shows the story being reworked in stages. A document of 1820 says only that the king of Dahomey has been deposed and his brother has taken the monarchy. In 1843 a French trader found people speaking of Adanzan with great caution while acknowledging the fact. Gezo's own singers at the annual customs of 1850 abused Adanzan by name as unfit to rule a warlike nation, which admits that he had ruled. After Gezo died in 1858 the account tightened. Richard Burton was told in 1864 that Adanzan had merely raised a mutiny. The court version recorded decades later made Gezo the designated heir all along and Adanzan a regent who would not hand over power.

Against the assumption that early Haitian authors were marginal, the essay lists dated notices for Vastey's works in the Baltimore Patriot in May 1815, the Boston Daily Advertiser that September, the Alexandria Gazette later the same month, the Christian Observer in December 1817, the Essex Register and the City of Washington Gazette in May 1818, the Vermont Gazette that June, the Daily National Intelligencer in February 1820, the American Beacon in December 1820, the North American Review and the Rhode Island American in February 1821, and the Essex Patriot in August 1821. Two German newspapers reprinted him in 1820 and 1825. The point of the catalogue is evidentiary. It establishes that the works of Vastey and Boisrond-Tonnerre remained part of the circulating historiography of the revolution in the Atlantic world at least until the end of the American Civil War.

The three largest British Caribbean revolts came after the Napoleonic war, in Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831, and Geggus ties each to a stage in the antislavery campaign in Britain. In every case the insurgents demanded that the authorities implement a law abolishing slavery which they believed London had passed and which local officials were suppressing. No such law existed. He counts more than twenty risings and plots between 1789 and the early 1830s built on this belief, sometimes including a claim that the working week had been cut to three days, and traces the pattern back to an aborted rising in Martinique in August 1789. The mechanism is a rumour of powerful allies, part wishful thinking and part deliberate manipulation by leaders, which sharpened the sense of injustice into action.